Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are...That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. - John 17:11b, 21

Sunday, August 31, 2014

I have been
studying Mormonism since 1987. Like anything else I study in depth, I try to acquire
the necessary resources to do so in a scholarly fashion. My Mormon related
resources have expanded to over 1,800 non-digital books; collections of the Ensign,
BYU Studies, Dialogue, and Sunstone journals/magazines;
most of what F.A.R.M.S and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute have
produced; and a very large, uncounted digital collection. Anyway, my study of
Mormonism has been anything but superficial.

However, it
has been a good 4+ years since I last did any sustained research into the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—and this primarily due to my focus on the
development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the early Church—but I will more
than likely jump back into my Mormon studies with a renewed interest (for a
number of reasons).

Last month,
I got involved in thread at the Mormon Dialogue & Discussion Board,
under the title: What's
Up With The Trinity. A new set of LDS missionaries had dropped by
earlier that day, and we got into a discussion about the Trinity. That evening,
I checked in on MDDB, and the above thread caught my eye. I did not
get involved in the thread until the 3rd day, with my 1st comment being #63 (LINK). The thread ended up with 336 comments, involving Catholics, Evangelicals,
Mormons and even a Muslim, covering a fairly wide range of aspects concerning
the doctrine of the Trinity.

Though
I had wanted to bring this thread to the attention of my readers towards the
end of July, I got a bit side-tracked with the Trent related threads here at AF
, summer guests and outdoor projects. But as the old saying goes, 'better
late than never'.

In
the month of September, I hope to build upon some of the issues raised in the above thread, as well as other topics, as I renew and ramp up my studies into
Mormonism (the Lord willing)...

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Getting History Right

The Reformers unequivocally rejected the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This left open the question of who should interpret Scripture. The Reformation was not a struggle for the right of private judgement. The Reformers feared private judgement almost as much as did the Catholics and were not slow to attack it in its Anabaptist manifestation. The Reformation principle was not private judgement but the perspicuity of the Scriptures. Scripture was ‘sui ipsius interpres’ and the simple principle of interpreting individual passages by the whole was to lead to unanimity in understanding. This came close to creating anew the infallible church…It was this belief in the clarity of Scripture that made the early disputes between Protestants so fierce. This theory seemed plausible while the majority of Protestants held to Lutheran or Calvinist orthodoxy but the seventeenth century saw the beginning of the erosion of these monopolies. But even in 1530 Casper Schwenckfeld could cynically note that ‘the Papists damn the Lutherans; the Lutherans damn the Zwinglians; the Zwinglians damn the Anabaptists and the Anabaptists damn all others.’ By the end of the seventeenth century many others saw that it was not possible on the basis of Scripture alone to build up a detailed orthodoxy commanding general assent. (A.N.S. Lane, “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey”, Vox Evangelica, Volume IX – 1975, pp. 44, 45 – bold emphasis mine.) [http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/vox/vol09/scripture_lane.pdf]

And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this…To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant. – John Henry Newman